The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [55]
But while Joe and Jane Consumer were having their shoes x-rayed at the airport, nobody in federal security was doing anything useful about the stark threat posed by private jets. Private jet owners were America’s richest people. Nobody in Congress dared to offend them.
American rich people were too rich to get treated like terrorists. Even though Osama bin Laden was plenty rich, and probably the world’s best terrorist ever. Shoko Asahara, the nerve-gas yoga mastermind, was so rich he could afford private helicopters. If anybody was a serious terrorist security problem, it was rogue rich people.
However, this huge gap in America’s air defenses hadn’t escaped the attention of the Air Force Office of Experimental Avionic Research in Colorado Springs. These guys, who had the sexy military-style acronym AFOXAR, had been working on the problem with some quiet help from NASA and DARPA. Their first conversion target was the BBJ, Boeing Business Jet, the largest and therefore most dangerous aircraft of the American private jet fleet. Their scheme was to come up with a small, secret autopilot that could be quietly installed inside jets and then triggered remotely during emergencies. Then the autopilot would guide the plane and its baffled terrorists right back to earth, and the waiting arms of fully informed police.
This scheme sounded simple enough, but the devil was in the details. Remote control of flying jets posed many daunting challenges, but one of the worst was the software. Because, if some clever hacker ever took over the control system itself, then all of America’s private jets could be turned instantly into remote-control flying bombs.
The AFOXAR guys had done a lot of career work on remote-controlled surveillance drones. They truly got it about air control and avionics problems, but serious network security was beyond their reach. Jeb had taken on the software problem for AFOXAR, because it was politically useful for the CCIAB to have a hand-in with homeland aircraft security. Though it made little sense from a technical perspective, it would get the attention of congressmen.
Van’s Grendel project had stabilized for the time being, so Van found himself tasked with retrofitting secure spy-satellite controls for use within private jets. Van doubted that this project was likely to thrive—it would only stay sexy as long as there were headlines about hijackers—but Van was not his own boss. Besides, once he looked at the technical details, it turned out to be very interesting technical work with broad applications.
After all, spy satellites were remote-controlled flying objects. They also had some very well-tested crypto communications protocols.
Van had never expected outer space to be so rich in supersecret high technology, but in point of fact, it was fascinating.
For some forty years an incredible variety of adversaries had tried to “spoof” American satellites. To hack and “own” a supersecret American KH-11 Keyhole or Aquacade in orbit—that would be a huge accomplishment in espionage, a much bigger deal than Falcon, or Snowman, or Jonathan Pollard. Huge enemy effort had been wasted in this. Nobody—not the Chinese, not the Russians, not even the French or the British—had ever touched America’s supreme technical command of telemetry, systems acquisition, phase-locked carrier tracking loops, phase-coherent tracking, and stochastic integro-differential hybrid multichannel carriers.
Van was truly in his element with this part of his new assignment, and he really enjoyed his briefings. Van was way beyond a mere “Top Secret” clearance now—he had achieved ratings like “Executive Gamma” and “NKR,” where his briefing material was brought to him by the hands of couriers, on flimsy, easy-burning sheets of typewritten onionskin.
The grumpy, reluctant NSA and NRO techs hated telling Van anything. Their stovepipe